Cover photo: Humanscale Float® tables in use. Photo: Humanscale

Humanscale is the global leader in office ergonomic products. We manufacture products that promote movement throughout the workday and allow people to adjust their workspace to fit their bodies, instead of the other way around. Each product we make is viewed through the lens of “will this keep people healthier?” and follows our design philosophy of Function, Simplicity, Longevity, and Beyond Sustainability. Established in 1983, Humanscale is headquartered in New York and has over 1200 employees and almost 60 offices, showrooms, or factories worldwide. 

Our founder and CEO, Bob King, has long had a passion for the outdoors, wildlife, and sustainability. Since Humanscale’s founding, sustainability was understood to be important, but it was not always clear what this would mean for each department. In 2012, I started leading a sustainability initiative that eventually grew into a department that reports directly to the CEO, influences how we do business, and focuses our efforts around a common vision of sustainability.  

I began the sustainability initiative with several months of measuring and monitoring the company’s existing processes and results to obtain baseline data. I then held a series of conversations with key stakeholders to determine what goals we were aiming to achieve with our new initiative. After over a year of discussion, and with direct guidance from the CEO, we decided that our corporate direction and end goal was to make a lasting positive impact and to leave the world better off through our sustainability efforts. Only reducing harm was never going to leave us with a world we want; doing less bad would simply not be good enough. We would not aim to just have “zero” impact; in fact, we would have to go past that to have the meaningful results we wanted.  Although we did not yet know exactly how to get there, we decided to aim to do more good than harm in real and measurable ways. We were excited and inspired to take on this ambitious goal: to be a Net Positive company.

And then we had to figure out how to do it. 

The new standard way of doing business

We started with a process to identify the applicable impact categories, stakeholders, metrics of success, and tried to put together a comprehensive plan. We quickly realized, however, that we could easily spend the next decade planning before taking the first step. Humanscale has an action-oriented, innovative, entrepreneurial culture that lends itself better to a different approach. A bit like the question “How do you cross a desert?” can be answered: “You point yourself in the right direction and keep putting one foot in front of the other.” We set off on our journey with a sense of where we wanted to be, and then kept taking the next steps toward our goal.

We began identifying every ingredient of every material used to make our products so that we could ensure the removal of all chemicals of concern. To power our production, we installed the largest solar power system that we could on our main factory. We also worked closely with our design team to be certain that each new product met strict sustainability criteria. We were making progress, but it was still hard to see how close we were to meeting our end goal.

When the Living Product Challenge (LPC) standard came out in the spring of 2015, it seemed like the perfect framework to evaluate if a product has a net positive impact. It shares the vision that manufacturing should not be limited to reducing harm, but also have a net positive impact and start to be part of the solution when it comes to our environmental issues. While Humanscale’s goals are company-wide and the LPC evaluates specific products, we understood that these evaluations would be very helpful in giving us a better understanding of our progress. 

Most of the LPC requirements had been previously addressed by the efforts of our company. The solar power system produced more than enough for Imperative 04 Net Positive Energy. The walking path and the outdoor space for factory workers contributed to imperative 06 Human Thriving. The Declare labels we had published would meet Imperative 09 Responsible Industry. Conservation work with the World Wildlife Fund to restore wildlife in critical parts of Eastern Cambodia exceeded the requirements of imperative 02 Habitat Exchange and 16 Equitable Investments combined. Our design process ensured that many of the specific sustainability criteria were already met, such as using FSC wood, disassembly for recycling, and optimizing the design using Life Cycle Assessment.

Some of the other requirements were already on our radar with a general plan to address them, but without specific deadlines. For example, we had identified Red List ingredients found in the products. Each of these red-listed components triggered its own project to find a replacement, have our engineers refine the design change, negotiate with the supplier for the change, and take the product through the months of cycle testing to confirm it still met our extended warranties. Before the Living Product Challenge, we tracked the recycling rates of our factories, but we had not given them enough focus to increase the rates significantly.  Fortunately, the requirements of the Living Product Challenge gave us focus and deadlines to make sure our good intentions were completed. 

Other LPC requirements caused us to expand our sustainability program. They highlighted elements that had not been in our near-term plans but were a welcome learning experience to improve our overall approach. We installed a rainwater capture system that now provides all production water. We commissioned a toxicologist to confirm that no exposure to carcinogens, mutagens, or reproductive toxins were contained in our products. We published a JUST label to be more transparent about our social impact. We completed Life Cycle Assessments to calculate the carbon, energy, and water footprints for each product. Lastly, we began “handprinting” initiatives to create and measure positive impacts.

Whereas reducing our footprints has us focusing on our own operations, our supply chain, and our products, increasing our handprints makes us focus outward. We had to be creative to look past our usual influence and find additional opportunities where we could make a positive impact. We saw an opportunity to engage our own employees and our clients to join the handprint initiative. This engagement would involve a large number of people and, even if each person took an action that seemed small, in aggregate they could add up to a significant impact. We started giving away LED lightbulbs with each LPC-certified Different Smart chair sold, with a request to use it to replace a less efficient bulb and let us know if this change was made. Because the LED bulbs are so much more energy efficient than the alternatives, each bulb changed would account for more than the energy used to make the chair – by us and the supply chain. There was a lot of positive feedback about the program, and some people even requested additional bulbs. Of course, excitement does not always create action or results. We were surprised to find that only a small percent of the bulbs were marked as installed. However, we still see great potential in engaging people in handprinting with the LED bulbs for our clients, so we are currently refining the LED program to ensure more bulbs are actually installed. 

We held events with our employees and clients to pump up tires to the right pressure. When a vehicle is running on underinflated tires it uses much more fuel, needlessly releasing additional CO2. By pumping the tires up to the right pressure, vehicle fuel would no longer be wasted, thus saving the driver the cost of the extra fuel and reducing CO2 emissions. We offered this service to the vehicle owners at our factory and at the client’s site and asked that they sign up to let us know that they would like their tires pumped up. Then, our volunteers identified the license plates of the cars that had been registered and pumped up the tires to the correct pressure. They recorded the amount of pressure they had added. By cross referencing this figure with the vehicle’s fuel efficiency and asking the owner about their driving habits, we could calculate the amount of fuel expected to be saved in a year. 

We also saw opportunities to partner with existing organizations that are already doing good work and help expand their efforts. We worked with volunteers in New Orleans to replace less efficient lightbulbs in affordable housing. We sponsored the planting of trees. We partnered with EcoRise to educate children in k-12 in New York, Dallas, and Boston about sustainability and support these young people in creating their own positive impact project. With schools being closed this spring, the school projects are on hold, but we are looking forward to seeing these projects in the fall. 

It can be a surprise to people when they learn that our handprints are not directly related to our product or supply chain. Every once in a while, we get skeptical questions about handprints.  For example, “What does pumping tires have to do with making chairs?” Of course, we work hard to minimize impacts in our supply chain. We also work closely with our product development team to make sure our products have a minimal or zero negative impact. But if we limit ourselves to only improving our current influence, we limit the amount of good we can achieve. One reason that handprints are so exciting is that they take us past our standard view. We need to be creative and find ways to influence the world for the better (and measure the improvement), which makes the potential for good unlimited. 

At the end of the day, our goal is to create more handprints than footprints, which would make us “net positive.” Put another way, this is when we would be doing more good than harm. We would be manufacturing while making the world better off in measurable ways. We are excited to be working toward this ambitious goal. 

Reimagining the future

That said, even when we become net positive, Humanscale alone cannot solve the world’s sustainability challenges. To create the future we want, the role of the business and manufacturing industry will need to evolve. These entities can no longer exist independently of the environment and society. 

The idea of a circular economy, where the waste from one product or industry becomes the raw material for the next one, can bring the hope of true sustainability. Unfortunately, this idea is usually only an exciting concept in theory. We have barely scratched the surface of changes needed to make a fully circular economy into a reality, and optimistic discussions of circularity do not usually address the massive infrastructure changes needed and how we might make this a reality. Skeptics might call it “recycling but for real this time.” One thing we have learned from the past few decades of promoting recycling is that that we won’t be able to recycle our way out of the mess we continue to create. 

We need a different approach to sustainability. We can no longer blame individual consumers and limit the change to asking individuals to change their actions. We need to set up systems that start with a circular model in mind and build the necessary infrastructures and supply chains. Although infrastructures and supply chains are not as exciting to talk about as shiny new products, this is where the biggest impacts are coming from and where real change is needed.

We also need to change the conversation from economics versus environment to one where we design our economic system to support our environment and our people. In the end, these are the same resources that support our economy, and ultimately, that support us all. As John Muir wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Much of the environmental harm happens when we convince ourselves that we are separate from our world. But, when we remember our place within the context of our amazing, awesome, almost magical world, we tend toward symbiotic solutions that are mutually beneficial. And with that mentality, we can set up a world where life can thrive today and for generations to come.